Tuesday, July 05, 2005

tourism vs. travel

I never thought that there would be any big difference between these two words: "travel" and "tourism" until I came across this paper "Representations of international tourism in the Social Sciences: Sun, Sex, Sights,Savings, and Servility" by Malcolm Crick. According to Crick and other sociologists, these two words certainly mean different things. While traveling is to discover the undiscoverd, or at least "reveal what history has discovered", tourism, on the other hand, "is merely about a world discovered (or event created) by entrepreneurs, packaged and then marketed". As MacCannell puts it, "the term 'tourist' is increasingly used as a derisive label for someone who seems content with his obviously inauthentic experiences". With the development of modern travel industry, tourism becomes a degenerate offspring of travel.